Back in the relative warmth of the tower, Projo pinched the bridge of his nose as Falira gestured for him to sit.
"Feeling alright?" She asked casually, observing her test subject.
"A week ago I was a virgin blacksmith's apprentice. Today I'm a wandering vagrant 'demon.'" He punctuated the last word by curling his fingers into air quotes.
When she didn't respond, he looked up to find her wordlessly scrolling away on parchment, glancing up at him every few seconds.
A pout formed without him even thinking about it, and he muttered, "That's a little rude."
She looked genuinely surprised. "What do you mean?"
He gestured a hand toward her, beginning to form a thought, but dropped it before the words came, his fingers curling back in.
A low growl from Projo's stomach cut through the quiet. He realized he hadn't eaten since that morning. The adrenaline and horror had masked it, but now a ravenous hunger was setting in. That was followed by a second realization.
He had no idea where he was sleeping tonight.
He looked around the chaotic but now murder-free room—the piles of books, the bubbling cauldron, the single, narrow cot tucked into a stone alcove. Falira was scribbling away, still periodically glancing at him.
"Do you think I do anything… demonic… while I'm asleep?" He tried to sound casual.
The wiggling feather on the end of Falira's quill slowed to a stop, and her eyes darted up to him over the rim of her spectacles.
"I... what?" she stammered. "Spontaneous ectoplasmic manifestations? Somnambulistic levitation? Uncontrolled pyrokinesis?"
Projo's head slowly tilted to the side as she spouted off what he wasn't entirely sure were actual words.
Her eyes narrowed as her common sense kicked in. "Is this some shitty attempt to get me to sleep with you?"
Projo's eyes went wide and he blustered, "What? No! Until a couple days ago I'd never even had sex before! I never thought I would! Why would I be trying to do something like that again?! Now?! With you?!"
She looked completely caught off guard. A moment later, a hot flush crept up her neck.
"Alright, alright! I get it!" she snapped, returning to scribbling notes about him. "It was a... logical fallacy. My apologies." She muttered the last part under her breath.
Projo's groaning stomach interrupted them again, and Falira let out a sigh. "You're hungry. And you have nowhere to go, is that it?"
"Well I mean," Projo shrugged, "I could go rent a room at the inn. But then you wouldn't get to study me."
Her gaze drilled into him with an almost bored expression, then she pointed a finger toward a small, curtained-off alcove. "I have stores you are welcome to. Dried meat, hard cheese, a loaf of bread that's probably seen better days. It's not a feast, but it's sustenance."
She then looked around the chaotic, circular room, her gaze lingering on her own small cot before sweeping to the dusty, empty floor space on the opposite side of the room.
"You can stay here tonight," she said, the words coming out clipped and formal. "There's a spare bedroll in that chest." She pointed to a heavy trunk. "You will sleep over there. On the far side of the room. As far from my cot as the architecture will allow."
She hesitated for a moment, then walked over to a shelf and selected three small, milky-white crystals. She knelt on the floor where she expected him to lay his bedroll and began placing them in a careful triangle. As her fingers touched the stone, a faint, silvery rune flared to life on the surface of each crystal, casting a cool, pale light.
"What's that?" Projo asked curiously.
"A proximity ward," Falira said without looking up. "If you move more than three feet from your designated sleeping area, or if there is any significant fluctuation in your... ambient energy... I will be alerted."
She stood up, dusting off her hands. "You are a subject in my laboratory now, Projo. And a good researcher always takes precautions." Her voice was devoid of any warmth.
"Oh," Projo replied, the reality of his situation sinking back in. "That makes sense."
They ate in silence.
The hard cheese and stale bread were tasteless in Projo's mouth, but he ate mechanically, his body screaming for fuel. Falira picked at her own portion, her eyes constantly darting between him and the parchment she scrolled notes on between bites.
When they were done, she retreated to her cot without a word, pulling the curtain almost completely shut. Projo unrolled the musty bedroll onto the cold stone, the three glowing crystals forming a faint, pale cage of light around him. He lay down, every muscle aching, his mind racing. The images of the day replayed themselves in an endless loop: Gideon's hateful snarl, the sickening crack of his ribs, the impossible flight of the sword, the final, gurgling sound.
He closed his eyes, but sleep was a distant country he couldn't reach. The soft bubbling of the cauldron and the distant, muffled roar of the sea were the only sounds in the oppressive quiet of the tower. He could hear the soft rustle of Falira's own blankets, the small shifts in weight that told him she wasn't sleeping either.
An hour passed. Then another. The weight of the silence finally became too much to bear.
"Hey, uh, Falira?" he asked hesitantly. "Are you still awake?"
There was a long pause, so long he thought she was feigning sleep. Then, a soft rustle, and her voice cut sharply through the hush.
"I am."
Projo was quiet for a moment before answering. He had questions he wanted to ask, but now that he had a chance, the words stuck in his throat. He refined his approach, switching to a clinical tone before forcing the words out. "I have… some questions. Related to my um, abilities. If you're open to answering them."
Another long silence stretched, punctuated only by the soft plop-plop of the cauldron. Projo was about to assume she'd finally fallen asleep when he heard the rustle of blankets again, more purposeful this time.
"Very well," Falira's voice emerged from the darkness. "I wasn't sleeping anyway."
There was a soft groan of a cot, and he could just make out her silhouette as she sat up, a dark shape against the faint glow of the various crystals in the room. "Ask your questions. Be precise. I will answer what I can based on established arcane principles, though I must stress that your case appears to be... outside ordinary parameters."
Projo nodded to himself in the dark, then cleared his throat. "Well. To start with. As you stated, my magical abilities are tied to… sex. Of which I have little experience."
"Yes," Falira said scientifically. "You mentioned you've done it just the once."
"Oh, uh… twice actually. The first time healed us. The next morning was uh…"
She didn't answer right away, and when she did, she sounded flustered, yet trying to hide it. "What's your question."
"Right," Projo said. "Well, when we uh, when we were done, she seemed to indicate that there was an excess of… stuff. From me."
The silence stretched awkwardly.
"A lot more than is normal I guess," Projo added.
The silence in the tower felt so heavy he felt like it was mocking him. The darkness felt thick and awkward.
Finally, Falira's voice cut through, strained and unnaturally formal. "Explain. Be specific. This is not tavern gossip; it is data. Define 'excess of stuff'."
Projo swallowed hard.
"She said... that it felt full. That there was a lot of it. And when I... when I pulled out," he cringed, forcing the words out, "it just kept coming. Soaked the bed. She'd never seen anything like it."
Another suffocating silence descended. He could almost hear the gears turning in Falira's mind, the scholar battling the mortifying topic.
When she finally spoke, her voice was low and clinical. "Projo... was there anything else unusual about the... medium? A tangible warmth that lingered? A faint luminescence in the dark? A distinct... energetic signature?"
The questions were so bizarre, so completely outside his frame of reference, that he was momentarily stunned. "I... I don't know. It was dark. I was... distracted."
"Think," she pressed. "This is important. If your power is a symbiotic transference, and the physical act is the catalyst, it stands to reason that the physical... byproducts... are linked to the arcane process."
"Hmm," Projo said, thinking. "You have a theory?"
There was a rustle of her sitting up straighter on her cot. "My hypothesis is that your body is acting as a crucible. It is taking in an energy source—the life force of your partner, perhaps—and amplifying it. The healing you both experience is the... radiant overflow of energy."
His brow furrowed. "Why do you think there's so much uh—medium?"
She took a shaky breath. "The 'excess' you describe… if there truly is some impossible volume... it might not have been purely biological at all. It may have been the amplified energy itself, given physical form. Condensed life force. Raw Mana, made manifest."
The theory made sense. A question shot from his mouth before he even thought twice about it: "I shoot Mana from my dick?"
He heard the smack of her palm against her forehead, followed by a deafening silence. Even the cauldron seemed to hold its breath. He heard her make a small, choked sound.
"That is the most..." Falira's voice started, high and strangled, before cutting off and starting again. "That is the most vulgar... reductive... and biologically inaccurate way of phrasing the hypothesis!"
He saw her silhouette stand up, but she didn't move toward him.
"It's not... shooting," she hissed. "It's a... a conduit! A focused expulsion of transmuted vital energy! The physical medium is merely the vessel for the arcane..."
Her voice trailed off and the silence returned.
"...but," she finally said with a tone of agonized resignation. "...in the most simplistic, uneducated, hammer-swinging terms imaginable..."
She took a breath.
"...yes. Essentially. Gods help me, yes."
Another long pause stretched.
"So…" Projo was trying to lock it all into place in his mind. "Can you clarify what's going on with my Mana?"
"Isn't it obvious?" She asked almost immediately. "You're not creating it. You're siphoning it. You're taking in your partner's own life force, their own Mana, exponentially amplifying it, and then releasing the supercharged overflow."
Projo lay there with his mouth open, analyzing her words. Then he sat up slightly, trying to see her through the dark. "Okay… so. You say I'm siphoning Mana, but Mira wasn't a mage."
The darkness in the tower felt suffocating.
"That's a common and dangerous misconception," she said. "You don't need to be a 'mage' to have Mana, Projo. Every living thing does. It's the energy of life itself. It's in the blood that flows through your veins, the breath in your lungs."
She paused, clearly forming an analogy he would understand.
"Think of it like this. You're a blacksmith. Every person in the world, from a king to a farmer, is born with a small lump of raw iron ore. It's just a rock to them. They carry it, but they don't know what to do with it. A mage is someone who has spent years building their own forge. They've learned how to light the fire, how to heat their own ore, how to hammer it and shape it into something useful."
Her silhouette leaned forward in the darkness.
"Your body... what you are... it's like a primal, master forge that you were born with instead of your own 'ore.' It can take anyone's—that girl Mira's, for instance—and burn it hotter and brighter and more efficiently than any mage could ever dream of."
The implication of her words was chilling.
"The healing you both experienced, the pleasure... that's the radiant heat pouring off this impossible fire. But the core process is still consumption. You used her ore. You burned her fuel."
"But she said she didn't feel drained. The opposite, in fact."
Falira's voice dropped. "She felt energized from the radiant overflow, yes. But I guarantee you, if I could have tested her Mana channels afterward, they would have been as empty as yours are now. You drained her, Projo. Even if she didn't feel it."
Projo laid back down carefully, weighing Falira's words. He breathed one last question, oblivious to the implication it carried.
"What would it do to a trained mage, I wonder."